Asgard's Secret (25 page)

No one, alas, had
ever found a map to show us how the levels were connected.

Getting the sleds
down to level one took us more than an hour. Myrlin had left one of his own
ropes dangling from a piton at the rim, but I had to rig another one to let the
equipment down. It was biotech cord, made out of tangled monomolecular strands,
and phenomenally tough. It didn't mind the cold in the least and could be
reeled up so tightly that one man could carry the best part of a million metres
of it if he wanted to. We didn't need that much; we didn't intend to play
Theseus while we were searching down there in the Labyrinth for Myrlin the
Minotaur.

There had once been
a ladder of sorts in the vertical shaft, but corrosion had got at it since the
days when the cold had put paid to all kinds of rot. On level one chemical
processes had been operating again for a long time.

Eventually, we got
down into a semicircular covert, and were then able to move along a short and
narrow tunnel to a much bigger one, which must have been one of the cavies' main
arterial highways. The torch mounted on my helmet was just powerful enough to
pick out the far wall.

"Where are
we?" asked Lieutenant Crucero. We were keeping a single open channel for
collective communication, so that everyone could hear and speak to everyone
else. Crucero turned to me when he asked the question, and his searchlight
dazzled me. That can be a real headache when you're working with a team in the
levels—people need to get used to looking anywhere but at the face of the
person they're addressing.

I'd recorded the
vital data from the notebook on one of the sound-tapes woven into my
shoulderpads; I could use my tongue to call up the tape, and to wind it forward
or back at my convenience. Saul's trail would be blazed, with his private
symbols scored on the wall at every junction, but I still needed the tape to
help me decipher the symbols. As for the rest of the commentary Saul had
thought it desirable to append to his notes—most of that was snugly stored in
my memory, or so I hoped.

"Saul says it's
a main road," I told Crucero. "Probably runs the entire length of
this arm of the system. Other roads branch off at regular intervals, and they
have their own sub- branches,
et cetera.
A lucky find, that
trapdoor—they don't all bring you down to such a handy spot."

I had deduced from
the notebook that Saul had used this door a dozen times, and there were plenty
of tracks around to confirm the deduction. Allowing twenty-five days per trip
that meant he'd been coming here on a regular basis for something over an
Earthly year. He'd come back from most of those trips with nothing more than
commonplace stuff, picked up by the wayside down in three or four. Then, out of
the blue, he'd hit the big one: the biggest bonanza in the history of galactic
prospecting.

And he'd lined
himself up to be tortured and slaughtered by the likes of Amara Guur.

It doesn't seem
adequate, sometimes, simply to shrug your shoulders and say,
c'est la
vie.

"Let's get
going," said Susarma Lear.

We set off along
the highway, travelling northwest. We didn't talk much, though my companions
were inclined to ask the occasional question. Mostly, it was Crucero who did
the asking—perhaps curiosity was part of the second-in- command's duties. His
requests for practical advice were easily answered; the big questions remained
undebated, save for one medium-sized one.

"If he never
read the book," the lieutenant asked, having observed the abundance of
signs of previous passage, "how does the android know which set of tracks
to follow?"

"Saul told
him," I said. "Maybe he's got an eidetic memory. After all, once you
can design your own androids, you can start improving on nature's equipment, in
more ways than one. If I had to guess, though, I'd say that he's probably
working from a tape that Saul made for him while they were at my place, to
explain the meaning of the symbols in his private code. Either way, the
android won't find it as easy to find the way as we will—that's why we stand a
reasonable chance of catching up with him."

"Only if he
makes for the dropshaft," said Serne darkly.

"There's
nowhere else for him to go," I pointed out. "If he doesn't intend to
come up again, he's got to get down into the warm. If he does intend to come
up, he'll need to bring something worthwhile out of the depths in order to make
himself so useful to the Tetrax that they'll protect him against
all
his enemies."

"Let's
concentrate on making good time," the star-captain said. "Drop the
chatter and pay attention to what you're doing."

The troopers obeyed
the order without demur.

The highway was
empty. The layer of ice that dressed it was very thin; little water had found
its way in here, and level one was warm enough for frozen water to be the only
kind of ice there was. The surface was smooth enough for the sleds to glide
over it as easily as anyone could wish—I didn't even mind taking my turn to
haul one.

Once or twice we
passed lumps of slag, which were all that remained of the vehicles the
indigenes had driven along the road in the unimaginably distant past. They were
parked in alcoves, so as not to block the way—the cavies had been tidy-minded
people.

"How do you
ever recover anything useful from
those?"
asked
Crucero, after the star-captain had given him tacit permission by pausing to
inspect a lump of debris.

"We
don't," I told him. "It's not even honest rust—the cavies were
biotech-minded, like the Tetrax and your late enemies the Salamandrans. That
was an organic car. Most of its materials were probably made by some kind of
artificial photosynthetic process, though its electronics will have used
silicon and all the normal stuff. It's pure garbage now.

Scavengers find nothing worth a damn on
level one . . . the best loot comes from three and four, where time stood still
once the cold worked its way down in the days of the big blackout. Hardly a
molecule stirred until the C.R.E. operatives began opening doors again. The
heat of the sun hasn't percolated down there yet, and we scavengers tend to be
reasonably careful with our plugs and our little bubble- domes."

"Move!" said the star-captain
tersely.

We moved.

21

We must have marched past thousands of
wide-open side- roads. Some had flash-marks where Saul had engraved the record
of his past explorations with a cutting-torch, but most of them he'd simply
ignored. How he'd decided which ones to explore, I don't know: he'd just
followed his instincts, or his whims.

We took a rest
after three hours on the road. It had been a very long haul and I was
dog-tired, but the troopers seemed to be taking it in their stride. It was a
picnic, I supposed, by comparison with mopping up on the surface of a
firestormed planet. They didn't say.

Where my suit's
systems were plugged into my body at the torso and the groin I was beginning to
feel sore. I also felt a little sick, because it always took a while for my
body to get used to the chemical tyrant on my back. My stomach was still
expecting food, and was complaining because it wasn't going to get any. It's
not easy turning yourself into a cyborg.

I wondered if the
android was having similar problems, or whether he had been built to be
adaptable.

We had already lost
contact with the outside world; the roof over our heads was opaque to radio
waves. I wasn't quite sure what kind of bugs Amara Guur had planted on us, but
I couldn't see how he intended to track us. The piddling little things that
Jacinthe Siani had put in the star-captain's hair and the device they'd put in
the binding of the book couldn't transmit much of a signal. If he was using
electronics, any obscuring of our trail we could do once we were off the
highway would probably throw him— he surely didn't have any idea what Saul's
flashmarks meant.

I felt that I had
no cause to feel complacent, though. Amara Guur might be an evil-minded
reptile, but he was clever, and although I knew next to nothing about them, I'd
heard of Tetron-built pseudo-olfactory tracking devices that would allow people
carrying certain special organics to be trailed halfway across a world after a
five-year lapse of time. We'd had to buy a lot of equipment, and any item of
that might have been set up to leak something that might be quite imperceptible
to us but stink like a skunk to some kind of artificial bloodhound.

By the time we set
forth again, the silence and the sameness were beginning to get on the nerves
of the troopers. Serne and Khalekhan began swapping irrelevances, while the
rest of us listened in. They were aware that they were putting on a kind of
performance, but it was obviously something they'd done before. They must have
been on other long missions communicating on an open channel, and they'd built
up strategies to cope with the fact that there were others—including
officers—listening to their every irreverence. But the chatter soon palled, and
it fell to me to take over the role of talker-in-chief. After all, I was the
one who was on home ground, and had some relevant things to say.

What I didn't say,
even after I'd made enough observations to know that it was true, was that
Myrlin was making better time than I had thought possible. His tracks showed no
sign of hesitation, and he had an enormous stride. I was glad about that, but I
knew that it would only make the star-captain's tight-lipped mood even worse.

The going became
even easier once we had turned off the highway on to a side road, which quickly
brought us to a different kind of territory.

I could see that
the troopers were impressed by the wider open spaces, where the ceiling was
twenty metres up instead of ten, the roof being held up by great pillars spaced
at wide but regular intervals.

"This is
farmland, cavie-style," I told them. "As far as the experts can
judge, much of the farming would have used artificial photosynthetic processes,
some of them liquid- based and some solid. There's some debate as to whether
they ever used actual organisms at all. Where the Tetrax have built their own
primary-production facilities under Skychain City, they've put in vast carpets
of green stuff driven by light, heat, or direct electrics—they produce various
kinds of single-product foodstuffs adapted to the needs of the various races,
which we generally call 'manna.' The carpets also churn out other useful
materials, extruding and dumping them underneath. There has to be a complicated
irrigation-system, and a transportation-system for packaging and distribution
of the products. The cavies' original system was probably similar—down on two
you'll see the channels which carried water and the tracks that carried the
trains."

"Were there
lights up there?" asked Crucero, pointing his searchlight up at the
ceiling.

"Sure," I
said. "But it's the devil's own job trying to track the power cables.
There seem to have been a lot of authentic electric light bulbs, but not
everywhere. Other places there are what we think was some kind of artificial
bioluminescence—the Tetrax can do that, too, after a fashion. There are
probably cables of some kind connecting all the levels, maybe running deep down
to the starlet itself . . . the central fusion reactor, if there is one. But
the walls are so thick and so hard it's almost impossible to get into any
conduits or expose any integral systems."